Ericsson Innovation Award 2018 -
Regional Winner

Bot Busters

Project Details:

Social networks constitute one of the major venues for massive information sharing and their popularity renders them
one of the most impactful means to form or shift public opinion. Recently, a great raise of ill-motivated Social
Bots, has been witnessed aiming to manipulate community sentiment. Social bots nowadays constitute coordinated armies
controlled by malefactors who aim to manipulate and deceive media users. While social media enable the reproducibility
of fake news or misleading information over the web, Social Bots take care of amplifying their popularity and catch
social community’s eye though crafted viral trends. Social bots are leveraged in order to manipulate the market
by forming trends in favour (or against) products/services and brands’ reputation [1], while it is believed that
they have played an important role in election periods by spoiling (or benefiting) the political profile of candidates.
To this end, the endeavour of finding, validating and sharing the truth in the 5G era implies the detection of those
coordinated nodes, understanding their motivation and revealing the main influencer actor.